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Rahul Kanwal’s full circle in Cardiff: what an honorary fellowship says about Indian journalism’s changing guard
A homecoming to Cardiff reveals how Indian television’s most decorated editor built his career, and why fact-checking became his unlikely calling card.
MUMBAI: Twenty-four years is a long time in journalism, long enough for a wide-eyed 21-year-old on a Chevening scholarship to become the editor-in-chief running one of India’s largest news networks. That is the arc Rahul Kanwal, now at the helm of NDTV, traced this month when Cardiff University handed him an honorary fellowship, a gong usually reserved for the great and the good rather than the jobbing hack he once was on its campus.
The optics were neat, almost too neat. Kanwal returned to Cardiff not as a nervous fellowship participant clutching a notepad but as family patriarch, watching the Class of 2026 collect its degrees under the same Red Dragon that once watched over him. Vice-chancellor Wendy Larner and provost Damian Walford Davies did the honours, alongside the school of journalism, media and culture, known locally by its acronym, JOMEC.
Why this matters beyond the sentiment. Fellowships like this are as much about institutional signalling as personal nostalgia. Cardiff’s journalism school has long punched above its weight in producing broadcast talent for British and international newsrooms; garlanding an alumnus who now runs a major Indian network is good business as much as good manners. For Indian media, having one of its own recognised by a serious Western journalism faculty is a reminder that the old one-way traffic, Indian journalists trained in the West, rarely the reverse, still shapes who gets to lead newsrooms back home.
The career arc is the real story. Kanwal’s rise runs through the engine room of Indian television news: news director roles at both India Today and Aaj Tak, then executive director at Business Today, before landing the top job at NDTV. Along the way he built a reputation on election-night marathons and interview programmes such as Newstrack and Jab We Met, and, more unusually for an Indian TV executive, he put real institutional weight behind fact-checking. His Anti-Fake News War Room and the push to bring open-source intelligence, or OSINT, techniques into Indian newsrooms were early bets that verification would become a competitive advantage rather than a cost centre. In an information ecosystem as noisy and politically charged as India’s, that bet looks rather better today than it did when he made it.
The bigger argument he is making, and the one worth scrutinising rather than simply applauding, is that journalism’s essential job has not changed even as its tools have. Artificial intelligence, instant distribution and an attention economy that rewards speed over accuracy have transformed how news is gathered and pushed to audiences. Kanwal’s contention is that the craft underneath, separating fact from noise, earning public trust, remains constant. That is a comforting thesis for anyone running a legacy broadcaster, and it is also, conveniently, one that justifies continued investment in editorial judgement rather than pure automation. Sceptics might note that plenty of newsroom leaders have said as much shortly before their organisations got disrupted anyway.
The Chevening angle deserves a mention too, since it is doing quiet work in this story. The scheme, funded by the British government, has for decades exported soft power one scholarship at a time, seeding foreign newsrooms, ministries and boardrooms with alumni who retain a residual fondness for Britain. Kanwal’s own trajectory, Delhi University, then Cardiff on a Chevening ticket, then Harvard Business School’s general management programme, is a fairly on-the-nose advertisement for that model. Britain does not extract much in hard cash from this kind of exchange, but the goodwill dividend, in an era of jostling for influence in India, is not nothing.
The verdict. An honorary fellowship changes nothing operationally at NDTV, and it is easy to file this under corporate-nostalgia PR. But read alongside Kanwal’s actual record, building verification infrastructure years before it was fashionable, and doing so inside a highly commercial, ratings-driven newsroom, it is a reasonably credible marker of where serious Indian broadcast journalism thinks it needs to go: faster tools, same old rules.
